Have you heard of Twilight? The financial success of the series cannot be doubted. Its writing? If it has a claim there, it rests in creating a successful blank-slate everyman protagonist (or everywoman). The same can be said for many ‘isekai,’ Japanese portal-fantasy animations, and a variety of popular works. The Everyman Protagonist theory proposes that by giving a protagonist who is remarkably generic, possessed of a bare minimum of desires necessary for the story, the author can get a wide swathe of people to read themselves into the blank space. In doing so, they’ll to relate to that protagonist- in theory. By implication, distinctive characterization must the risk of divorcing the reader from the narrative, making him a spectator rather than a participant.

Which is better: the reader inhabiting the character or the reader knowing the character? The everyman’s writer hopes that the reader will emotionally project himself into the protagonist. In theory, the reader will triumph when the hero triumphs because the reader is the hero. He will fear tragedy, because it is now his tragedy; he will buy into the relationships because they are his relationships. The other model is the one followed in every classic story I can remember, including Pilgrim’s Progress: the reader cares about the character as another person. The reader gains an exceptional, even impossible intimacy with the characters, particularly the protagonist, and he therefore learns to care about the characters’ lives, however fictional they may be.

To me, the everyman model seems a misunderstanding, misuse, and abuse of the process of suspension of disbelief, not to mention a diminishing of one of the great virtues of literature. A misunderstanding, because suspension of disbelief doesn’t mean ‘I accept this story as true for myself.’ It means ‘I accept this story as true in regards to itself.’ A misuse, because it lessens the art. The main character is no longer a rich tapestry around whom the story develops, but as far as is possible he is a hole in the narrative, a place for the reader to impose himself and pretend (not suspend). A misunderstanding and a misuse also because instead of calling a man to set himself aside, it requires him to import himself wholesale into the narrative.

It is an abuse because of all these lapses. What else do I call a literary convention which uses the process of suspension of disbelief in a way that results in less artistry, less beauty, less weight to the story? Admittedly, I do not think it is completely inherent to the everyman convention to be so lesser; probably some exceptionally skilled author could write a story which remedied these issues or used it to excel in other ways, enough to counterbalance. Yet even then it would require a work of peculiar and immense virtue to be worthwhile, for the everyman structure, as we’ve been discussing it, cannot but inflict a wound against one of the great virtues of narrative: that it teaches us to see other people more, to set ourselves in them and care about them, to evaluate them as people rather than things, to exert our judgement against others whether in condemnation or vindication. The everyman structure removes the reader’s ability to exercise this faculty and learn this skill with the main character or protagonist.[1]

The everyman model also fails to work for more than one person. Whereas the traditional model not only allows but encourages a multiplicity of characters, the everyman model really only works for one character at a time.

G.K. Chesterton, an author undoubtedly more skilled than me (for now), presents a theory of story which seems to contradict me here. He says: “The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.” This seems at first blush an endorsement of the everyman model’s professed method, that of setting up a blank normality as the protagonist in order that everybody can understand him. That interpretation, however, reads into Chesterton what he does not say and misses what he does say.

An inspection of Chesterton’s protagonists (and those of fairy tales) is mete here. Chesterton’s protagonists are not blank slates. They are vibrant, roiling masses of passion and energy, whether Patrick Dalroy who crusades for the merry inns of England, Innocent Smith who chases his hat and elopes with the maid, or James Turnbull who runs all over England trying to find a place to fight to the death in vindication of his atheism. They could hardly be more eccentric. If we think about the protagonists of fairy tales, meanwhile, we find a collection of characters who are generic only in being archetypical- and archetypes are not truly generic at all, being composed of prominent, absorbing traits. We find characters of great determination, ambition, passion, and guile- tricksters, novices, lovers, and more.

The normality which Chesterton points to is not generic blankness. It is humanity, the common passions and logic and thoughts of men. Whether a retired revolutionary (Dalroy) or a bookshop owner (Turnbull) or a farmer’s son (the ‘Jack’ of Beanstalk-fame) or a maiden (Cinderella) or a wandering Highland Catholic (Evan MacIan), there is a central humanity, of wanting human things. The protagonist may even be of high estate, a prince or princess, but he wants a human thing. He wants good company; he wants home; he wants adventure (Innocent Smith, in a way); he wants a good living; he wants manhood; she wants womanhood; he wants a woman; she wants a man; he wants to have certainty of mind on the most basic and prosaic of things, the nature of God. “Always the man alone longs for mercy,”[2] but the man who is alone is no less exceptional for the commonness of his want.

Chesterton’s crusade, in a great part, was to declare that normality was no grey thing, no blandness. The blank everyman is not normal; he is an inhuman monstrosity. No man is a hole in the world. It is for this reason that the everyman is not related to; he is inhabited instead, to the story’s detriment. The normal person, seen aright, is a boiling pot of passion and thought and vigor, of life. A moment’s time and home becomes vibrant, for home is the strangest of places. Everywhere in the world except my home is normal; to be Home is to be a miniscule minority against the backdrop of the universe. So with a man: each man is a marvel, not because he is alien to his fellow men, but because he is made from the same themes into a different melody, because (in Christian terms) he is the Imago Dei.

So the everyman is not what Chesterton is pointing us to here. He is instead decrying the viewpoint that makes inhumanity and divorce from normality into the qualification for story. The everyman theory is that the best way to get readers involved is to present them with a blank canvas. This points out that the converse is true. What makes a story a part of a person is the vivid life of another person, of somebody whose passions and worldview differs but it still within mankind. Indeed, if Chesterton did write those ‘abnormal heroes’ he here deplored, he wrote them as the antagonists of his stories, as with Lord Ivywood, a man who has sharpened himself to only one element of virtue, austerity and self-control and sincerity and zeal, who has made that virtue so much the center that it becomes a vice and a blinder. To depart from the complexity of the human being, to sharpen oneself into a mere proposition, such is death and destruction of the soul.

So the everyman convention is, if not entirely unusable, far from the savior it pretends to be. Fairy stories and myths and legends, if nothing else, should assure us of this. They are the stories which have gone through centuries of telling and re-telling, of refinement and experimentation, and what has come out the other end may be compared to a diamond: pressured until only the purest, most effective elements remain. They do not give us blank slates. They give us living men and women, people sometimes small and sometimes great, but people. We connect to stories not through inhabitation, as the everyman would have it, but through relationship.

God bless.

Written by Colson Potter

---

[1] I don’t consider relatively a blank narrator to be an ‘everyman’ in this sense. I refer to protagonist-everyman, not the narrator who is more structural than personal.

[2] The Wanderer, trans. R. Liuzza.